This is Glencoe,
a Glen of exquisite beauty and yet a valley of endless tears.
In its beauty there s a dark bloodstain that ll never be wiped clean
A massacre of unwitting hosts, a murder under trust.
If you re interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history,
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime let me tell you a story If you re watching this then I m guessing
you ve heard, at least, something of the Glencoe massacre.
Campbells murdering MacDonalds after enjoying their hospitality
in the Highlands, but surely anywhere a deadly sin.
In one of the local inns to this day there s a sign saying: No hawkers and no Campbells.
I think that s largely for effect, but a trans-Atlantic cousin, of Scots decent,
told me that at their Highland gatherings they refuse to talk to adherents of Clan Campbell.
In fact that three-hundred-year-old atrocity is so abhorrent, so unforgivable
that to this day they won t even eat Campbell s soup.
Is that the way to think about it? In the first two weeks of February 1692,
a group of soldiers under Robert Campbell of Glenlyon had been billeted here with the
MacDonalds of Glencoe. When the troops
arrived the MacDonalds were suspicious. But Campbell presented papers requiring
quarters to be given in lieu of taxes , and since Alastair MacIain, the chief of the
Glencoe MacDonalds, had signed a submission to King William s authority only a month before ,
he could hardly refuse. The culture of Highland hospitality
would have made refusal difficult anyway. Soldiers and their clansmen hosts shared
buildings like this reconstruction at the National Trust for Scotland s visitor centre in Glencoe.
As the days passed, they lived hunted, ate, drank, gambled and exchanged stories and songs.
Barriers slowly came down. Then on 12th February 1692...
orders came down. Ultimately those orders had come from London.
The MacDonald s of Glencoe were to be wiped out entirely.
Slaughtered like the animals they were. In truth the orders came earlier than this,
but they had passed through a lot of hands... and before he passed them on Colonel John Hill,
Governor of the Garrison at Fort William, questioned the orders
Alistair MacIain had come to the fort to sign his submission to King William before
the deadline date of 31st December. Hall had reluctantly told him he had
to head through howling Hogmanay snow to sign in the Campbell town of Inveraray.
Bad weather, detention by government troops, and a Sherriff who was on holiday then vacillated
as to what to do, meant that the signature wasn t actually taken till 6th January.
A month later, some larger clans STILL haven t signed ,
and Colonel Hill has given both verbal AND signed indemnities and assurances of protection
to MacIain and some of his MacDonald clansmen. Why carry out an inhuman act of terrorism
against them? In truth he knew.
To instil terror in those other clans was exactly the purpose.
The MacDonalds of Glengarry had castle walls to overcome.
Much easier here. But what was Hill to do?
An elderly gentleman with two spinster daughters and still
waiting for money the government owed him He was in no position to resign.
Plus, the authorities suspected over long that Hill had treated these Highlanders
with too much humanity So they d placed under him the
ruthless and ambitious Deputy Governor, James Hamilton, with whom they could deal directly.
Under him they sent Major Robert Duncanson leading half of the regiment of Argylls.
They could be relied on. Eventually Hill passed the orders on to Hamilton.
He had positioned troops at Inverlochy, whilst Major Duncanson had his at Ballachulish.
Each of these forces would cut off one end of the glen and set Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon
to do his work inside. As dusk fell Hamilton
forwarded the order to Duncanson. Fall on the Macdonalds at 7am
I ll take my troops over the pass and down
the aptly named devil s staircase to close the Glen from Rannoch.
Duncanson forwarded the orders with a message to Campbell of Glenlyon.
Only now did Glenlyon find out why he d been sent.
He was to fall on the MacDonalds, not at 7am but 5 the next morning.
Duncanson wanted to get there when it was all over.
If you were Alistair MacIain of the Glencoe MacDonalds you would be in your bed at 5am.
Woken by a servant who tells you that the soldiers you d hosted these last
two weeks were at the door. They d received their orders.
Assuming their orders were to move off elsewhere, you tell the servant
to organise some whisky so that they can take some hospitality before they go.
It s as you re pulling on your trousers that you look up to see
That was the start of the slaughter. Up and down the glen are little townships,
clusters of houses like these ruins at Achtriochtan.
One such township was Inverrigan, where one of Campbell of Glenlyon s company later reported
I saw eight persons killed and several houses burnt, and women
flying to the hills to save their lives. MacDonald of Inverrigan, and the eight men
of his household, were carried beyond the door, still bound hand and foot.
They were thrown upon the dung-hill, and there Glenlyon shot Inverrigan.
One by one the others were also killed a slow, methodical slaughter with musket and bayonet.
A soldier who rifled Inverrigan's coat brought his captain a paper he had found,
and Glenlyon called for a torch so that he might read it.
It was a letter from Colonel John Hill, giving the MacDonald protection ,
and assuring him that he and his family, his land and his stock, were free from molestation.
Now Glenlyon stood between his soldiers and the final victim and said Hold! .
As the soldiers stared Captain Thomas Drummond arrived and demanded of the waiting soldiers:
Why is he still alive? What of our orders? Kill him!
When no one moved, Drummond raised his pistol and shot the young man through the head.
A young boy ran out of the darkness and he clawed at Glenlyon's legs,
crying that he would go anywhere with the Campbell if his life were spared.
Glenlyon could say nothing, and the boy was shot on Captain Drummond's order.
As a captain of Grenadiers Drummond s orders were followed.
It just sounds better if it was a Campbell.
What they don t say is the troops weren t all Campbells.
Privates on the muster rolls included: Campbell, MacCallum, MacDiarmid, MacKissock,
MacKellar, MacIvor, MacUre and MacNichol. Lowland, NCOs had been brought in from the regular
army to stiffen up the raw Argylle conscripts. Men like John Kilpatrick, Walter Purdie,
John Lindsay, Robert Barber, John Lundie, Walter Bruss and Robert Jackson,
and of course Major Duncanson, who led them, was from Stirlingshire.
That s a lot of folk to ignore at your clan gathering.
Neither were the clansmen of Glencoe all MacDonalds.
I met up with archaeologist Derek Alexander at the remains of one of the massacre sites,
the township of Achtriochtan. It s the work of Derek and his
team here that s given us the information for building this turf house.
As we chatted we discussed how the townships in this glen would have contained Rankins,
MacColls, MacPhails and Hendersons we re going to come back to. ..
but a clash of clans between Campbells and MacDonalds is so much simpler , more Hollywood.
Of course, there would have been MacDonalds in
these houses who had carried out raids on Campbell lands,
and there would have been Campbells amongst the troops who still bore a grudge.
But the Campbells themselves stole from neighbours
Here they were just useful tools of state. Robert Campbell of Glenlyon wasn t chosen
to captain the murder squad by accident. Notorious as a drinker, gambler and debtor,
he d had to sell his own lands to The Duke of Atholl to cover debts.
He d been taken under wardship of Campbell of Breadalbane and Argyll
to stop him raking up more debt. His lack of reliability is probably
why he was never informed of the plan until the night before the morning s massacre.
His indebtedness was why they were orders he couldn t afford to ignore
and just in case, when his instructions came , they included the words:
See that this be put in execution without feud
or favour, else you may expect to be dealt with as one not true to King.
This massacre was ordered by the king This massacre happened because these clansmen
had been slow to submit to that king. In 1888 William of Orange had landed
in in the south of England and taken over from James VII and II.
They called it The Glorious Revolution because there ws no bloodshed
in England. There followed sixty
years of blood and conflict in Scotland and the bloodshed in Ireland has barely
stopped yet. It s a dilemma.
What do you do when a new king overthrows the old one to whom you ve pledged allegiance?
What do you do when a new crime family takes over protection of your streets?
What do you do when a corporate takeover restructures your department
or rationalises your job? What do you do when your new
bosses tell you that your next job is to murder men, women and children
in cold blood? If you ve signed
an oath to the king and article sixteen says that refusing an order can result in death
article nine says that giving advice or intelligence to the enemy means death.
Article nineteen says that to commit murder or wilful killing is death.
Now your orders are to go out and murder those children.
What do you do? I said we d come back to Hendersons.
This is the Henderson stone. The story goes that the night before the massacre
there was a game of shinty going on here. One of the Argyll soldiers was dealing with the
very dilemma I ve presented to you. What does he do?
It s said that having drawn the attention of a local with a fixed look,
he talked to the stone, saying: Great stone of the glen! Great is your right to be here.
But if you knew what will happen this night you would be up and away.
Did these things happen? Did something like it happen?
We know that two officers who came over the hills with Deputy Governor Hamilton
broke their swords rather than follow orders.
Other soldiers looked the other way as people fled to safety.
There s some indication that some Campbell Highlander privates were far more disgusted by the
task than some of their lowland sergeants who had a hatred of all Gaels.
John Dalrymple First Earl of Stair and the Secretary to the King, was the Lowlander
who ordered, and expressed glee at the prospect of this slaughter,
but he was 500 miles away in Kensington when it happened
and King William slept soundly in his bed. Maybe this massacre wasn t so much hatred of
your neighbour, as contempt from a distance. Was it really about Campbells and MacDonalds?
I m not suggesting for a moment that there was no clan loyalty or enmity
when it came to these clans. In drawing rooms far from this
glen people in power used loyalty and enmity for their own ends.
MacDonalds and Campbells a sacrificial lamb
and a scapegoat before the alter of power. Glencoe was about who would submit to power
and who would look the other way. In France James had cared little for those
who so preciously protected their oath to him. In Britain, King William ordered a massacre,
the Earl of Stair delighted in it, Colonel Hill despaired of it,
Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton welcomed the opportunity for advancement,
Campbell of Glenlyon was ambivalent, many scribbling solicitors were just
doing their jobs and the soldiers, whose job it was,
had many different names and made different choices that night
There s no shortage of guilt to go around. but judgment doesn t rest with
a clan or a name . but the moral choices made by
many individual links in a long chain. The biggest question of Glencoe is:
What would I have done? What would you have done.
There s another video about the Jacobite years coming up on screen now.
Tha mi an dòchas gum bi lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda